


She Would Want You To

by blak_cat



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 06:15:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4776671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blak_cat/pseuds/blak_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You are going to fall to your knees again. Back on the ground, you sob, and sob, and sob. You are without a friend, you have no heartbeat and your lungs don’t work. What is left of you? 335 years are nothing now, you want to give them back, erase it all, be Mircalla again and blissfully saunter through life and die a normal age, centuries before Laura would ever take a breath and tear to pieces everything you ever cared about.</i>
</p>
<p>A look at Carmilla alone in the world for the first time in centuries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Would Want You To

**Author's Note:**

> Brief warning: the implication that Carmilla was raped by the original Baron Vordenberg is touched upon here

_Please just don’t cry, hold your head up high, she would want you to, she would want you to…._

\--

Your knuckles are bleeding. They’re broken, probably, too. They’re black and blue and you can’t move your fingers. You don’t want to, there’s no reason left to. Your face is sticky in tear streaks and you feel cold. The universe would be too kind to let you drop dead. 

_But you’re here for a reason, Carmilla._

_You need to repay your debt, Carmilla._

Oh God you are so alone. Your mother and father are dead, the Karnsteins long gone and anyone now who shares your blood is a distant relation at best. The home you grew up in is in ruins, the mother who sheltered you for 300 years is gone, the brother you picked on for decades is someone else entirely now. And your one true friend, your constant protector, playmate, and mentor is gone forever. 

You are alone. And your knuckles are bleeding and your hands are broken and she’s not there to wrap them and tap your nose and make fun of you for being so young and weak. 

You let out another shriek as you swing your hands again and blow the bricks of the wall into dusty crumbles on the floor while your fingers crack more and you drop. On your knees in the grass, fresh tears water the ground and join the warm streaks already scarring your cheeks. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” you sob over and over until it’s nothing more than whispered sighs.

She wasn’t there to comfort you, you had to be your own comfort now. And you couldn’t even use your goddamn hands to push yourself off the ground. 

You should be embarrassed by the sobs. Mattie was in your hear, chuckling at you _vampires don’t cry kitty cat._ But oh God you were human tonight. 

Why hadn’t it been you? 

There are students around, looking at you, some perhaps even taking pictures. Good, let all of social media see you slumped on the ground like a child, bleeding and crying. Let Laura admire her handiwork.  
You wobble up to your feet, slipping a bit and catching yourself with a hand to the wall and now your knuckles feel like nails have been wedged in and everything is going numb. You leave a red smear behind on the wall as you pull your hand away and begin taking steps. 

The students run. They shout for the patrols and scream _help, vampire!_

It’s an old song you know well. And for every moment you could not sink your fingers into Danny Lawrence’s neck and pull, a student’s throat would go out in her place. You are going to water the grass with deep red and leave a trail of bones for Laura to follow. The buildings will be dust and it will be nothing but a scorch mark on the ground by the end of it all. 

You are…

You are going to fall to your knees again. Back on the ground, you sob, and sob, and sob. You are without a friend, you have no heartbeat and your lungs don’t work. What is left of you? 335 years are nothing now, you want to give them back, erase it all, be Mircalla again and blissfully saunter through life and die a normal age, centuries before Laura would ever take a breath and tear to pieces everything you ever cared about.

She caused you nothing but harm, and even now, you cannot bring yourself to hurt her, should she come to stand right in front of you. 

_I am Fortune’s fool…_

\----

Nothing in life compares to waking back up from oblivion. To be in nothingness and then suddenly to smell damp and mold and solid rock, to open your eyes and see the dark, to feel the cold again but not like before. Peasant and common folk talked of vampires and made signs of the cross and protected their cottages in the wilderness. 

And yet here you were. And somehow you knew, you knew exactly what you were and what’d you’d become. In the dark of this somewhere that was not your grave you’d woken something else entirely. 

“Hallo?” you tested in the darkness. Your voice came back to you and nothing else. 

You sat up, there was stone beneath you and your clothes were torn. You smelled blood. You’d never done that before and it pulled and itched at your nose and you looked down to find it all over your. 

Something kicked behind your stomach and you gasped as you felt a pinch in your gums and the pads of your thumbs grazed underneath newly sharpened points. But that pounding in your stomach was relentless and you licked at drops of dry blood on your wrist and on the stone table beneath you. 

You needed more. You were so hungry and oh God what had they done to you? You saw it now like a stranger outside your body, the Vordenbergs. What had he done? 

You ripped wildly at the dress, removing the bits dosed in blood, anger only building and building at each new tear in the strings of your mother’s old dress, the one she wore to the salons in Gratz. Get it off, get it off, get it off. 

You were on your feet for the first time and they felt new. Legs hardened in death come back now to be everything they never were in life: sure and solid and the tools to carry deliver you from all that misery. Misery of ballrooms and men hovering over you and now Baron Vordenberg had taken in death what you wouldn’t give him in life. 

You barreled out the door in a crack like thunder and shower of splinters and you were so hungry and the image of his throat was so appetizing and the promise of pulled screams was making that hook in your nose pull more and more. 

You met servants as soon as you broke surface into the main level of the schloss and your practices on their throats, tearing wildly and lapping up everything you could. It was so warm and thick and new and it filled holes in your stomach like cake and roast and bread never could in life. 

You chased wildly after others, indiscriminate as you opened veins, took a few sips, and then let it all pool and waste on the marble floors. You hunted them down because you were fast and that was new, they couldn’t outrun you as you dragged them to the ground. And the floors filled until you found _him_.

The baron’s blood you did not waste. You bit down and tore and he screamed and tried to push you away but your jaw was iron on his throat as you sucked and sucked and pulled some more and his screams became horse and his knees buckled. You only released him as he lay twitching, eyes darting wildly, trying to focus on you and you began beating him. Fists knocked his face between them over and over until two strong hands on your shoulders pulled back and he kept twitching. 

“Be still darling,” someone said to you in French. A woman’s voice. A strong woman who smelled like Earth and felt warm like a bed as she wrapped her arms around you. 

Another woman came into your eye line, this one was tall and pale and smirking down at the dying baron. She kneeled down and placed her hands gently on his cheeks, sighing and smiling all the while before in one quick jerk she snapped his head to one side and in a crack his twitching stopped. 

“Well, well, we’ll need to get you cleaned up mein kaiserin,” she said softly, walking over to you and pulling out a cream kerchief, embroidered with a swirling and beautiful “L” in one corner. 

The soft fabric came to your cheek and wiped away a few streaks before she turned to the woman holding you and spoke in English you didn’t understand. She patted your head lightly as she walked out and the arms that held you loosened a bit, turning you around. 

You weren’t sure if you’d seen anyone so beautiful in your life when you saw her. She was tall and dark but her eyes were warm and she was gentle as could be with her knuckles soothing drying blood on your cheeks. 

“My name is Matska,” she said, continuing in French. 

She pulled you along and asked you questions and you answered as simply as possible, your head down because she was so pristine and you were torn up and seeping in deep red. 

She drew a bath for you in one of the bathrooms of the schloss and helped you remove the remnants of life. You tried not to shrink beneath her gaze as you stood naked in the washroom but her eyes were unashamedly traveling over you though none of it felt threatening. She gently tapped your nose with her pointer finger. 

“Maman has taste indeed,” she said. “You are a beautiful woman Mircalla and now you’ll be so forever.” 

She sat with you while you wiped away splotches and streaks until the water turned murky. 

“You’re to come with us my dear,” she said, her fingers dancing along the surface of the water lazily. “Away from this ice wasteland and on to much finer things.” 

And so it was. 

Matska stomached only you to call her Mattie did so only if you answered back to her feline pet names.

“Oh come now kitty cat, you mustn’t take it personally,” she said one night, her arm lazily draped around you as you sauntered through the cobblestone streets of Paris, champaign in your hands. 

“I am a ferocious black cat of the night,” you said through hiccups of bubbled wine. 

“Oh yes, so ferocious. I hear you purring-- _purring_ \--in those girls’ ears. Intimidating indeed,” she giggled, nuzzling into the side of your cheek as you pushed her away in feigned annoyance. 

You cowered together under the stern look from your mother as you bumbled in a little too loudly at the apartment door. Her arms were crossed you bit your lip to keep yourself from smiling while Mattie elbowed you hard. 

“I hope you had your fun with your little play, you’re late,” she said dangerously and you gulped but Mattie gave a small pinch to your hand and it calmed you for a few seconds. 

“ _Elektra_ was wonderful mother, thank you for asking,” Mattie dared because she was older and could get away with it. 

“We’re leaving tonight for Steiermark,” she said, ignoring the backtalk. “The carriage is already waiting.” 

“Steiermark?” you ask. 

And so begins your usefulness to mother and the years you lure victims into a mysterious pit are punctuated with escapades with Mattie, all over the world. You have races to see who can drain veins faster and get drunk off alcohol by the barrels. You chased down writer and poets and snuck into art galleries and museums. 

And when you awoke from that coffin and she found you in Berlin she hugged you tightly and didn’t say a word for hours as she sat with you and held your hand and eventually promised not to tell your mother. She then complained about a new baby brother you’d both received and how mother built up a school in her misery at locking up her favorite child. 

“William is an imbecile and I think mother regrets any attempt at replacing you,” she said. “He’ll just love to meet you, the beautiful and cunning Mircalla he gets compared to once a week.” 

She took you to see the ruins at Pompeii as a reunion gift and you walked among the ashes and stone and the bodies forming living statues out frozen fire. Matska passed down stories about how mother was there the day it happened though you’re not sure you believe that. 

She entertained your newfound obsession with the night sky, allowing you to drag her on rooftops to sit and watch instead of traipsing about the town and guzzling blood. She even bought you star charts and when the sixties hit she bought you some odd book about “the zodiac” and you memorized your sign in the stars, watching it every night because a piece of you could be up there with them. 

She smiled and held your arm when mother found you and forgave you and together you watched in awe as man stepped foot in the sky for the first time, grazing the stars as they settled on moon dust and you cried for the first time since you’d been locked in that coffin. 

“Tears Mircalla? Really?” she teased and you elbowed her, pulling closer to the TV screen and memorizing the fuzzy words from the American astronaut. 

A giant leap for mankind and for the first time in centuries you felt like you were one of them, sharing in the wonder and Mattie was next to you the entire time. 

And on and on it went with years of laughing and nights out and stars. 

Until the memories came to a stop. 

\---

You’re under the stars again and she wasn’t there. You’re more alone than you’d ever been and they were cold tonight, the stars. They were glaring at you, judging you, and oh God they couldn’t turn on you too. _Please Mattie tell me you’re still here somewhere_.

But the wind is still and the trees don’t even hint at a rustle.

“I miss you,” you whisper through a sob. 

The night sky is so still you thought the Earth might have stopped turning. It seems as thought even the stars stopped twinkling, if just for a moment. 

“So, so much,” you gasp out and you’re on your knees again.

If only you were allowed to breath so you could feel the pain of sucking in air you didn’t deserve. You can still smell her perfume on your neck. You always hated it and joked that cat piss smelled better but it was from Paris and she’d fancied the original designer decades and decades ago. 

She must still have another bottle somewhere, you should find it. You should go back to that house and collect her from the floor. She didn’t deserve to lay among enemies, on the cold ground, alone in mother’s house. They accused her and accused and accuse her still you imagine. 

You should go get her, you need to get up so you can get her and bring her to rest under the stars, you should stand but your hands are burning and bruising from the inside out. You need to do it though, you need to—

_I’m not there kitty_ , her voice seemed to say in your head. 

New tears, silent this time, responded because you know that. That body is nothing now, the real Mattie is nestled safely in your chest, and she’ll be there forever. She’s not with enemies now and she never will be again. She’s with you, she’s with you, she’s with you…

“Tell me what to do,” you whisper. “You have to tell me what I do now.” 

Nothing. 

She’d always been there why was she gone? You could still feel her hands on your shoulders and on your arms and you weren’t even embarrassed when you hugged yourself and pretended she was there, one last time. 

You have to get up, you have to stop crying. She used her last breath to warn you. And she’s not there to pull you up like some many times before. 

You have to get up on your own now. 

So you pushed. And it hurt, shooting all the way up your arms but you pushed because she’d want you to and you convince yourself you hear her whisper in your ear _well done Carmilla, keep going_. 

Your hands are shaking by the time you were standing and you tell yourself you’re not going to fall over, you’re going to take steps without her there to hold your hand. And so you did. 

One foot. 

Then another. 

And you’re walking on your own now. You don’t know where, she’s not here to help you decide. Maybe you’re walking towards her, trying to find her, trying to hold her one last time and say how sorry you are—

No. She wouldn’t let you. You have to walk away from her. She’s gone and you’re still here. The stars are twinkling again and maybe she’s one of them now. Maybe that God you laughed at forgave you both for everything you’d done and let her linger among starlight to watch you. 

You can’t fail her now, she’s watching you. She’s counting on you and how mad she will be if you lose your way and find yourself welcomed into oblivion with her. No, you have to keep walking for her, to find out who so badly wanted her hurt, who so badly wanted you alone. 

_I’m still here_.

And you could feel, perhaps, Mattie smiling whispering _just so, darling_ as you raise your head let the tear strains begin to dry. 

You will see her again one day, but not even one second too soon.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, as I said on tumblr, this is one of the few times I've cried while writing. 
> 
> Song in title/prologue: 
> 
> Above the Clouds of Pompeii -- Bear's Den


End file.
